r side, talking eagerly. "You don't
know how many times I have felt I would give most anything for the
opportunity of just seeing you and talking with you; those things you
said to me I always remembered." He had a hundred questions evidently
stinging his tongue. And some of them seemed to Mrs. Carriswood very
apposite.

"I'm on the outside of such a lot of things," says he. "When I first
began to suspect that I was on the outside was when I went to the
High School, and sometimes I was invited to Harry's; that was my first
acquaintance with cultivated society. You can't learn manners from
books, ma'am. I learned them at Harry's. That is,"--he colored and
laughed,--"I learned SOME. There's plenty left, I know. Then, I went to
the University. Some of the boys came from homes like Harry's, and
some of the professors there used to ask us to their houses; and I saw
engravings and oil paintings, and heard the conversation of persons of
culture. All this only makes me know enough to KNOW I am outside. I can
see the same thing with the lawyers, too. There is a set of them that
are after another kind of things; that think themselves above me and my
sort of fellows. You know all the talk about this being a free and equal
country. That's the tallest kind of humbug, madam! It is that. There are
sets, one above another, everywhere; big bugs and little bugs, if you
will excuse the expression. And you can't influence the big ones without
knowing how they feel. A fellow can't be poking in the dark in a speech
or anywhere else. Now, these fellows here, they go into politics,
sometimes; and there, I tell you, we come the nearest to a fair
field and no favor! It is the best fellow gets the prize there--the
sharpest-witted, the nerviest, and stanchest. Oh, talk of machine
politics! all the soft chaps who ain't willing to get up early in the
morning, or to go out in the wet, THEY howl about the primaries and
corruption; let them get up and clean the primaries instead of holding
their noses! Those fellows, I'm not nice enough for them, but I can beat
them every time. They make a monstrous racket in the newspapers, but
when election comes on they can't touch side, edge, or bottom!"

Discoursing in this fashion, with digressions to Harry in regard to the
machines, the furniture, and the sales, that showed Mrs. Carriswood that
he meant to keep an eye on his twenty odd thousand dollars, he strolled
at her side. To Miss Van Harlem he scarcely sa